Amazing Anvil Cloud Photo Snapped from Plane

Below:

Next story in Science

Flying high over the ground in a plane, a thunderstorm's anvil
cloud might be the last thing you want to see, but it's exactly
what a group of scientists conducting an airborne mission were
looking for.

The Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry
(DC3) experiment is investigating how large thunderstorms
affect the chemistry of the atmosphere by flying right into them.

After several practice flights and other prep work, the mission
got under way with flights of their DC-8 and Gulfstream V planes
on May 18 and 19. Twenty-seven specialized instruments installed
in the DC-8 sampled the inflow of the storm as the aircraft flew
a series of L-shaped patterns at different altitudes around
thunderstorm cells.

The May 18 flight flew over areas of northeast Colorado and
southwest Nebraska, flying four steps of a ladder pattern in the
cirrus clouds of a storm anvil, in addition to the L-shaped
pattern legs.

On May 19, both planes flew to an area west and northwest of
Oklahoma City, Okla., and performed similar flight profiles as
the prior day, including data collection around a huge
thunderstorm "supercell" whose anvil top reached an estimated
45,000 feet (13,700 meters) high.

DC-8 mission manager Frank Cutler snapped a stunning image of the
anvil cloud from the plane.

Anvil clouds often develop with cold fronts: When a mass of cool,
dry air pushes into a warm, moist air mass, the heavier cool air
acts like an atmospheric plow and pushes the warm air up into
violent thunderstorms. High winds aloft can make the cloud's top
into a flat anvil-like shape and their bottoms are usually very
dark. These clouds can produce some of the most severe types of
weather, including hail and tornadoes.

Scientists think that storm updrafts — when air from the ground
moves up to the surface — could bring chemicals that could
produce ozone, an important greenhouse gas high in the
atmosphere. The teams are looking to sample the updraft
environments to study what is going on there chemically.

The mission is also studying the lightning produced by
thunderstorms.

Funding for DC3 comes from the National Science Foundation,
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.